


We Found Love (in a Hopeless Place)

by seekrest



Series: Spideychelle Week 2020 [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Good Place (TV)
Genre: (except it’s not), (or are they????), Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst with a Happy Ending, Everything is fine!, F/M, Inspired By The Good Place, Not Canon Compliant, Peter and MJ are forking perfect together, Soulmates, its just me and my whims now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24859507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekrest/pseuds/seekrest
Summary: “You doing okay?”Michelle shrugs, feigning indifference as she says, “I mean if this is the afterlife, it’s not so bad.”She glances around before looking back to Tony. “I mean… unless this is bad?”Tony laughs goodnaturedly, shaking his head as he says, “Well it’s not the heaven or hell idea you’re probably thinking of but generally speaking in the afterlife, there’s a Good Place and a Bad Place.”He leans forward meaningfully, a smile on his face.“You’re in the Good Place.”—A The Good Place AU
Relationships: Michelle Jones & Tony Stark, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker
Series: Spideychelle Week 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1796938
Comments: 52
Kudos: 100
Collections: Spideychelle Week 2020





	We Found Love (in a Hopeless Place)

**Author's Note:**

> Me? Finding a way to do the soulmate AU prompt in a way that doesn’t make me wanna scream into the void cause soulmate AUs aren’t my thing?
> 
> It’s more likely than you think.

Michelle opens her eyes, focusing on the bright green lettering in front of her.

EVERYTHING IS FINE!

She doesn’t get the chance to wonder why things would _not_ be fine when a door opens, turning her head towards the sound and seeing a man with a warm smile on his face.

“Michelle, come on in.”

She does, trying to remember how she got here in the first place only for her mind to blank - taking a few steps forward until she’s inside the man’s office.

It’s generic, basic and completely ordinary - the only thing off-putting being the smile on the face of the man before her.

“Hi Michelle, I’m Tony. How are you today?” He says, gesturing for her to sit down. 

“I’m great thanks for asking,” she says, sitting in the seat across from him, “but uh one question, where am I? Who are you and what’s going on?”

The man clicks his tongue, leaning forward on the desk before he says, “Right. You, Michelle Jones, are dead. Your life on earth has ended and you are now in the next phase of your existence in the universe.”

He stares at her for a beat, a smile on his face that just unnerves here even more as she says, “Cool. Uh cool but… how did I die? I don’t remember.”

“Right well in the case of traumatic or embarrassing deaths, we tend to erase people’s last moments as a way of easing them into the afterlife. Would you like to know how?”

Michelle thinks about it for a second before shaking her head, “No, I’m good. But I’m a little curious about all of this.”

“Hmm?” Tony asks, Michelle gesturing to the room we’re in. 

“Who was right?”

“Well,” Tony tilts his head, folding his fingers together as he rests his chin on them, “a little bit of the Buddhists. The Hindus. The Christians got some stuff right but not all, Islam too. It’s--” Tony unfolds his hands and waves one around.

“It’s not important.”

“Right, cause dead.” Michelle says plainly, watching a flash of something mischievous in his eyes pass over them as he nods in return and says, “Yes. I understand it’s a bit of an adjustment.” 

“You could say that again,” she mutters only for Tony to repeat himself.

“I understand it’s a bit of an adjustment.”

She stares at him for a beat, catching his smirk before he throws his head back into a full-throated laugh, waving another hand around as he says, “Sorry, just a little human humor for you. I love you guys’ way with words. What is it, sarcasm? Excellent invention, glad to get the chance to use it.”

“Uh huh,” Michelle nods, tearing her eyes away from Tony before glancing around the office once again, looking for any clues to determine if this was some kind of elaborate hoax from her coworkers or if some kind of alcohol-induced nightmare that she’d yet to wake up from.

She remembered leaving the Bugle office, remembered that taxi driver that had yelled something obscene to her, flicking him off before making her way to the subway. 

But as soon as her memory gets to the edge of the steps, it goes blank - one minute staring down at the subway steps below her and the next waking up in an office that looked like Ikea and Pottery Barn had a baby and then threw up everywhere. 

“Michelle?”

“Hmm?” She asks, looking back to Tony to see the faint traces of concern on his face.

“You doing okay? I meant it as a joke but it’s true, I’m told that dying is a lot for a human to handle.”

Michelle shrugs, feigning indifference as she says, “I mean if this is the afterlife, it’s not so bad.”

She glances around before looking back to Tony. “I mean… unless this _is_ bad?”

Tony laughs goodnaturedly, shaking his head as he says, “Well it’s not the heaven or hell idea you’re probably thinking of but generally speaking in the afterlife, there’s a Good Place and a Bad Place.” 

He leans forward meaningfully, Michelle feeling like her heartbeat is racing even if logically - being dead - she knows that can’t be the case as he Tony says, “You’re in the Good Place.”

Michelle exhales, letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding as Tony smiles.

“You’re okay.”

* * *

The Good Place, as Tony calls it, isn’t so bad.

Too bad Michelle is convinced that she absolutely does _not_ belong here. 

She listens, nods appropriately and hums along as Tony takes her on a tour of the neighborhood - describing all of the amenities and the residents that inhabit the neighborhood that convinces Michelle that even the afterlife was a walking advertisement for capitalism; the IKEA warehouse style architecture and not so subtle inclusions of popular frozen yogurt chains everywhere. 

Michelle hadn’t really given a lot of thought to the afterlife when she was alive aside from a world religions class she took in college, more interested in the academics of faith traditions than the actual spirituality of it all. 

Yet this was clearly a mistake, on several levels. Michelle didn’t think of herself as a _bad_ person so to speak but compared to the dozens of people she’d been introduced to including a literal celebrity and famed philanthropist Liz Allan and an actual _monk_ named Ned, something wasn’t right.

As Tony ushered her towards the residences, Michelle was reeling - wondering just wrong button had been pressed in the cosmic afterlife that made her land among these people.

He’d explained the points process to her, the system that apparently had been put in place since the dawn of time to calculate how and why people should arrive to the Good Place or the Bad Place. 

It didn’t make sense to Michelle rationally and she wasn’t going to let death stop her from asking a thousand questions.

“All these people just… don’t make it here? It seems hard to believe,” Michelle says, Tony stopping in place before turning to her and putting his hands on her shoulders. 

“Again, it’s an incredibly selective system. Most people don’t make it here. But you,” he leans forward a little, Michelle feeling like he was staring straight into her soul, “a lawyer who got innocent people off death row, you’re special Michelle. And by the way, welcome to your new home.”

He lifts his hands off her shoulders and gestures to the gaudily decorated and brightly colored house in front of them, Michelle still recovering from him calling her a _lawyer_ much less the clown house in front of her. 

“It’s perfect isn’t it? See in the Good Place, every person gets to live in a home that perfectly matches their true essence.”

“Cool,” Michelle says, biting her lip as tries to come up with a believable lie, “that totally makes sense.”

“See, there’s that lawyer brain working for you,” Tony says with a smile, clapping his hands and leading her into the house.

It’s just as awful on the inside as it is on the outside, Michelle’s own memories of her sleek, modern apartment completely replaced for this rustic, suburban mom of three kind of kitschy style everywhere. 

Tony rambles on about the decorations and how they were _specifically chosen just for her_ yet all Michelle can circle back to is the ever apparent reality that she not only didn’t belong here, _they thought she was someone else_.

Michelle wasn’t a lawyer, much less one for those wrongly accused on death row. She’d wanted to become one, once upon a time - back when she was young and naive and actually thought all it took in the world was to work hard and make yourself known.

She learned the hard way that it didn’t matter what you knew but only _who_ \- throwing everything she could to get into law school only for the scholarships she applied for to go to other people, not able to reconcile the massive amount of debt that she’d be saddling herself for when her dad’s hospital bills continued to climb.

Michelle skipped law school, barely graduated college because of the amount of jobs she had to work - only for her dad to die not even a month before graduation - a funeral she couldn’t afford and a grief that she still hadn’t recovered from, the only silver lining being that at least his burial plot had been paid for at the same time her mom’s had. 

Michelle took as many jobs as she could before finally settling on the Bugle, the trashiest tabloid and the scum of the journalism scene but the only one that would take her with her mediocre grades - hoping that if she couldn’t change the world through law that maybe she could change it through words.

She had goals, once upon a time - dreams of being someone and doing something good. But apparently she’d died before she ever had the chance to fulfill them, an imposter even in the afterlife as she looked around the place that she felt yet again she didn’t belong in. 

“Peter! Come in, I got someone for you to meet,” Tony calls out, Michelle glancing from Tony to the man who walks into the room.

He’s cute, Michelle’s dead but she’s not blind - eyeing him up and down as he walks up to greet them.

He - _Peter_ , Michelle corrects - smiles before saying, “Michelle? Hi, I’m Peter Parker and you are my soulmate.” 

Tony claps his hands excitedly, Michelle’s eyes widening and her mouth dropping open. 

“ _Cool_ ,” Michelle says for the thousandth time today, “that’s… wow uh, okay.”

“Can I hug you?” Peter asks excitedly, Michelle barely getting the chance to respond before Peter swoops forward, his grip so crushing that it takes the wind out of her. 

Michelle awkwardly pats him on the back before looking back to Tony, returning the hug a bit more genuinely when Tony finally says, “Well, I have some other people to attend to. Welcome again Michelle to the Good Place.”

Peter lets her out of the hug, his whole face beaming as Michelle nods once more - Tony walking towards the door.

“So Michelle, where you from?” Peter asks, Michelle looking back to him. He stared at her expectantly, hopeful - the exact same kind of energy that everyone she’d met today had given.

“Call me MJ. And New York. You?”

Peter’s smile somehow grows even wider as he says, “Me too! Queens! Born and raised.”

“Brooklyn,” Michelle says, “I won’t hold it against you.”

Peter laughs, a light and clear sound as he shakes his head, “Well, you still made it here so you can’t be all bad.” 

Michelle blinks at that, feeling her heart start to race again. Peter tilts his head at that, looking at her up and down before saying, “Are you okay?”

“Huh?”

“Oh uh, yeah sorry. I’m,” he scratches the back of his neck, “this is really weird to be so open about it but we’re dead now so, I guess secret identities don’t matter.”

He brings his hands down, seemingly psyching himself up before saying, “I’m Spider-Man.”

Michelle drops her mouth open in shock for what feels like the nth time today, blinking a few times in disbelief as she says, “ _Spider-Man?_ ”

“So you’ve heard of me?” Peter asks sheepishly.

_Yeah, it was my literal job to tear you to shreds - even in death._

Everyone who’d been in New York for any length of time knew about Spider-Man. Small town hero, kept his nose to the ground. Michelle looks at the man in front of her, someone who can’t possibly be any older than her and her stomach feels like it’s turning into knots - trying to wrack her brain and try to remember when Spider-Man had first showed up on the scene.

It’d been when she was back in high school, only barely - remembering something about it her freshman year at a poorly funded high school after her scholarship for a magnet school fell through. 

She knew about Spider-Man in life but had known even more about him in death, the superhero dying in some kind of explosion underground with Norman Obsorn who not only turned out to be a sadistic jerk in the business world by day but a literal, actual super villain by night.

The identity of Spider-Man was never released - try as the Bugle did, _one of Michelle’s core jobs_ \- because of how thoroughly decimated their bodies had been in the explosion, the only proof that the two of them having some kind of fight being a shred of their logo and the disappearance of Norman Osborn. 

It was exhilarating in a sense to have finally cracked the code of who Spider-Man is only for Michelle to chastise herself at that idea of being so excited - especially when she knew it had less to do with finding out something new but rather an instinct for how it could help her now non-existent career. 

“Yeah, everyone knows Spider-Man,” Michelle finally says, putting a smile on her face that’s as fake as she feels. “Sorry you died.”

“Yeah, you too,” Peter says with a laugh, ruffling his hand through his hair before looking more solemn.

“I uh, I didn’t always have the best luck when it came to love, back when I was alive. So when Tony told me that we’d have soulmates here it was like-- like the universe was finally paying me back you know? Like… I’d finally have a chance here. To do it right.”

Peter takes her hands, Michelle feeling immobilized by the sincerity in his eyes and the warmth of his strong grip as he rubbed a thumb over the back of her hand.

“We’re soulmates, MJ. And I can’t wait to get to know you better.”

Michelle stares into his eyes for a beat, searching his face before asking, “Peter, you’ll stand by my side no matter what right?”

“Of course I will--”

“Promise me,” Michelle says more determinedly, her heartbeat thundering so loudly that she feels like it’s going to burst out of her chest, “you would _never_ betray me.”

Peter looks at her with confusion for a half-second before his features stand firm, nodding with a fierceness in his expression that almost makes Michelle want to take a step back.

“I promise MJ, I would _never_ betray you.”

“Good,” Michelle says, taking a deep breath, “Cause there’s been a big mistake. I’m not supposed to be here.”

Peter blinks a few times, hands still enclosed around hers.

“Wait _what_?”


End file.
